Memorial Day. Time to pay tribute to our fallen heroes, celebrate summer’s unofficial start and enjoy festivities and food.
There will be barbeques and picnics, hot dogs and hamburgers, chips and pickles, popsicles and soft drinks. All of these packaged foods will have labels, and all of these labels will be getting an overhaul.
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration announced the modernization of the Nutrition Facts for packaged food. The newly approved labels are intended to help people make healthy choices. But will they actually do that? Or might they do the opposite?
One of the biggest changes with the new labels, and the one which gets First Lady Michelle Obama most excited, is the clearer information about serving sizes, with calories now listed in large bold typeface. However, focusing on servings or drawing attention to calories may not be good for public health. In fact, highlighting calories alone could make us sick.
For one, a focus on calories inevitably becomes a focus on fat (the food component with by far the most calories). High-fat, higher-calorie foods become unhealthy and undesirable; low-fat, lower-calorie foods become healthy and desirable.
[See: The 12 Best Diets for Your Heart.]
But high-fat is not necessarily bad. Think packaged foods like nuts, olive oil and guacamole. Foods like these may support healthier weight and better health. The FDA now recognizes (sorta) that it is less the amount of fat than the type that is the problem, removing “calories from fat” (although not “total fat”) on new labels.
There seems to be less recognition that low-calorie is not necessarily good. Low-calorie packaged foods often tend to be full of added sugars. This is a big problem. Driving people toward lower-calorie items might drive them away from healthier foods and straight toward sugar.
Of course, to the FDA’s credit, new food labels will now for the first time highlight added sugars. But what appears on that line of the label will not include added starches (such as tapioca starch, corn starch, potato starch and wheat starch), which the body essentially recognizes and processes no differently than sugar.
Food companies could simply use the new labels as a guide to re-engineer unhealthy products, to be no less — and possibly even more — unhealthy. It has happened before, and it could happen again, especially when the focus is on an isolated nutritional component.
Coincidentally, days after the FDA made its announcement about labeling, I did an audio recording that was very much related. The recording was for a subscription continuing medical education service for physicians and was based on my previous talks on nutrition and nutrition myths.
I talked about why focusing on calories or fat, or saturated fat, or sodium, or even calcium, like the new label does, is a bad idea. Such component focus is nutritional reductionism: the tendency to look at foods as merely collections of parts is a frankly dangerous practice.
Nutritional reductionism attempts to collapse complex biology into simple accounting with virtual balance sheets of assets vs. liabilities. “Assets” are supposedly desirable components of foods such as vitamins, minerals, fiber and protein. “Liabilities” are supposedly undesirable components like saturated fat, sodium, cholesterol, and sugar.
I won’t go into all the possibilities here, but suffice to say that focusing on foods in this reductionist way only creates new opportunities for consumers to eat badly, for companies to design less-healthy food products and for consumers to choose them. With new labeling, the industry can engineer boast, and proudly advertise reduced fat-hotdogs that might have minimal fat and saturated fat (sounds healthy) but lots of unlabeled replacements like tapioca starch (maybe not so healthy).
In fact, the latest research casts doubt on the significance of saturated fat in the diet to begin with, except that when saturated fats are replaced with refined carbohydrates like tapioca starch, the results are pretty convincingly not good for health. Moreover, processed meat products like hotdogs (particularly those derived from industrial meat production) are pretty convincingly not good for health, irrespective of the fat, saturated fat or whatever other selective components appear on the nutrition label.
[See: 7 Reasons to Choose a Plant-Based Diet.]
Another selective component that would be prominent for hotdogs is sodium. But it is not the sodium that makes these processed products unhealthy. Contrary to popular belief, higher sodium intake may not increase the risk of blood pressure-related outcomes such as heart attacks, stroke or early death. In fact, consuming sodium at levels higher than recommended may protect against these outcomes. Also, added sodium might actually make some food healthier. For example, consider how the high-salt cabbage that becomes kimchi may contribute to the enviable heart health of Koreans (Korea ranking No. 1 for coronary heart health out of 172 countries despite the high-sodium kimchi intake of its population; the U.S. ranks No. 66).
Another selective component the new FDA label highlights is calcium. But is a sugary juice drink with added calcium somehow healthier? Ignore for a moment that supplemental calcium does not favorably improve bone density or reduce risk of fractures like many people think, and that it may increase the risk of kidney stones, heart attacks and other adverse events. Even if it were to somehow benefit bone health, calcium is a part of bone like bricks are part of a building. Dumping more bricks on the job site does not lead to a stronger building; you need builders, and equipment, mortar and fuel to incorporate the brick appropriately. In the same way, dumping calcium into the body does not lead to stronger bones without the provision of other important components (e.g., zinc, copper, magnesium, manganese, vitamin K … none of which are included on the nutritional facts label).
What about fiber? Is a sugary candy bar, I mean “breakfast bar,” healthier when it can claim a greater amount of f iber as on the new label? Certainly real whole foods that are high in fiber are healthy. We would all do better to choose more naturally high-fiber foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, legumes and beans. But injecting a junk food that is mostly sugars, refined starches and assorted other artificial ingredients with wood pulp or arthropod shell (you read correctly) does not improve it in any way from a health perspective. In fact these “functional fibers” might cause gastrointestinal distress and malabsorpiton of other nutrients.
The point is that nutritional reductionism is misleading at best, and harmful at worst. It may lead to products for consumption and patterns of eating that do not support health. Focusing on select food components, as on a label, can give the impression of being healthy or healthier when a product is in reality still garbage — or possible even wors than garbage.
So this Memorial weekend, ignore food labels and focus on whole foods (not food constituents). When choosing whole foods, focus on food from farms, not factories, and foods from living botanical plants, not industrial processing plants.
[See: The Best Foods for Lowering Your Blood Pressure.]
If you are going to put patties on the grill, consider those made from beans, lentils, grains or veggies. Or if meat is on the menu, at least try to select animals that dined on natural vegatation themselves, not those raised on frightening mixtures of manure, antibiotics, hormones and ground-up parts of other animals. For pickles, try fermenting vegetables yourself (like kimchi) as opposed to buying spears in sugared vinegar. Try baking chips from various vegetables, make popsicles from smashed up whole fruit and try soda of the “club” variety (i.e. seltzer), flavored with twists of citrus or berries.
Let’s kick off this summer season right. Let’s honor our fallen by living strong ourselves.
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Memorial Day: Fire Up the Grill and Be Wary of Food Labels originally appeared on usnews.com
